Backups that actually work
Most businesses have a backup. Far fewer have one they have ever restored from. Here is the simple rule worth following, and the failure that catches almost everybody.
Almost every business we talk to has a backup of some kind. Very few have ever restored from it. That gap is where the painful stories come from, because a backup nobody has tested is not a backup. It is a hope.
The rule worth remembering
It is usually called 3-2-1, and it has held up for decades because it is simple:
- Three copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.
- On two different kinds of storage, so one failure cannot take out both.
- With one of them offsite, somewhere a fire, a flood, or a theft cannot reach.
Your working file counts as one of the three. So a laptop, an external drive on the shelf, and a cloud copy gets you there.
Sync is not backup
This one catches good, careful people. Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive are excellent at keeping your files in the same state everywhere. That is the problem. When a file gets deleted, corrupted, or encrypted by ransomware, sync faithfully copies that change to every other device you own, quickly and automatically.
Most of these services keep version history that can save you, but it is often limited to 30 days and it is not always obvious how to use it under pressure. Treat sync as convenience. Keep a real backup separately.
The failure that gets almost everybody
The backup that has been silently failing for eight months.
The drive filled up, or a permission changed, or the folder got renamed, and the job has been erroring out ever since. Nobody noticed because nothing visibly broke. It only surfaces on the one day you needed it.
The close cousins are just as common:
- The backup ran fine, but of the wrong folder.
- The backup is encrypted and nobody knows where the key went.
- The backup exists, but restoring it needs software the business no longer has a license for.
Every one of these looks perfectly healthy from the outside. The only way to find them is to actually restore something.
What to do about it
- Write down what would genuinely hurt to lose. Usually it is a shorter list than people expect: accounting files, customer records, contracts, photos, a couple of spreadsheets that run the place.
- Automate it. A backup that depends on someone remembering on a Friday will be skipped.
- Test a restore once a quarter. Pick one file at random and bring it back. It takes five minutes and it is the only step that proves any of this works.
- Keep one copy that ransomware cannot reach, meaning offline or write-protected. Anything your computer can quietly overwrite, malware can quietly overwrite too.
- Write down how to restore, and do not store the only copy of those instructions inside the thing you would be restoring.
None of this is expensive or complicated. It is mostly a matter of deciding once and then leaving it alone. The businesses that recover from a bad day are rarely the ones with the fanciest setup. They are the ones who checked.
Not sure whether your backups would hold up? Ask us and we will walk through what you have with you, no sales pitch attached.